To Love a Wells Woman
by hailbabel
Summary: [Note: Season 3 spoilers.] Isabella hasn't slept more than a handful of hours over the last week. Some stains cannot be scrubbed out, and some questions will never have answers.


Isabella stood in the doorway to the foyer where Charlotte had been found. The wine-dark stain on the floor still bore the gentle curve of her skull where it had been pillowed in a pool of blood. How long did she lay there before anyone found her? How long was she conscious in the warm trickle of her lifeblood, alone, before…

Isabella couldn't think of it any more. She needed to get up the stairs and go to her room to attempt sleep. She wouldn't sleep, she already knew, but she must make some cursory go at it. It had been a week. Charlotte was long gone from here, and her blood as well. But the stain remained. After the Justice had seen what there was to be seen, Maryanne had mopped and scrubbed, and mopped again trying to get it out. But the wood was porous, and thirsty. It drank up that colour, turned it a foul, dark brown, and refused to give it up. Poor Maryanne scrubbed her own hands raw, but there was no getting it out.

"I've tried everything, my lady," she had said, kneeling on the floor in her bloodied apron, her hands stained. "But it won't come out. It sat too long." Maryanne was something of a magician. She could mend anything, clean anything, make any room feel like part of a home. And until now never failed to set right any stain or dirt in this house. As fate would have it, this would be the one that bested her.

Isabella had stood in the doorway, hands braced upon the frame against fresh tides of grief.

"Leave it, then."

"My lady?"

Isabella had breathed deep to steady herself. "Don't trouble yourself further. Leave it."

But Maryanne hadn't been able to leave it. She tried every day. And she had tried again today if the fresh, crisp scent of soap was any indication. The two were starting to become linked in her mind, the unsightly stain and the smell of soap. She was going to have to speak to Maryanne again, make sure she stopped. The only thing for it was to restain the wood. Or perhaps have it all pulled up.

Isabella calculated the cost of these options as her eyes stayed fixed and unseeing on that spot. Again, she stood in the doorway, braced against the frame. During the day she was able to avoid this foyer, but it was the only way to and from her room. Charlotte was the first thing she saw each day, and the last she saw when she went to sleep.

Or, rather, went upstairs. Sleeping was a thing she only feigned lately. It taunted her with a dream she used to long for--to fall asleep next to Charlotte, and wake up next to her in the morning, rather than the dead of night when she would slink off with a kiss. Isabella used to believe that, one day, they would be together not only through the night, but the day as well. That perhaps she would convince Charlotte to retire, or perhaps she'd buy the house so that no one in it need rut for money.

Of course, neither of those was a real solution. Charlotte would never have abided charity, or to be caged like a pretty bird, never truly free again. And now. Now she never left. Her scent was so woven into the sheets of the bed that Isabella refused to sleep there that first night after…

The maid found her in a sitting room, slumped over a chaise, still in her emerald gown. She hadn't so much as unpinned her wig. She ordered the sheets changed that she might get some rest, but even that did not help. It seemed that every stitch of bedding was still clinging to Charlotte. On the third day, when no amount of washing and changing could get out the memory of her, Isabella ripped the bedding off of the mattress and thrust it all out the window. A maid was sent that day to procure a new set, and Isabella hoped that would be enough.

Blinking blearily against yet another rising sun, her eyes hot and sticky with lack of sleep, Isabella was finally unable to stay awake any longer. Unwilling to be defeated by the ghost of her yet again, she collapsed on the bare mattress and slept until the sky was dark again. Her sleep was neither peaceful nor restful. She lingered in the deep dark with no dreams for company, and yet awoke screaming with tears on her face.

That was the last time she'd slept more than a handful of hours since, and the last time in a week she'd slept in that bed. When she arose again, the staff seemed to shrink in her presence. More than usual, they evaporated when she entered a room. All save Maryanne, who had begun her obsession with removing the stain in the foyer until Isabella bid her stop. The woman probably would have scrubbed through to the foundation otherwise.

It was easy enough to stay distracted when planning the wake, or assisting in arranging the funeral. There had always been something else to worry about. Flowers, guests, clothing. But now all the guests were gone, save the one she wanted out the most. The one she had wanted to keep closest. Charlotte was in the ground, and yet still somehow here, laughing through the halls, her voice echoing around corners.

Isabella had burned the portrait Harcourt had sent her in hopes that it would be a fitting close to the brief bliss of their affair. She watched it blacken and curl in the fire and said her goodbyes, but anointing her room with the smoke had not been enough.

She picked a path carefully around the place where she knew Charlotte had lain. Here, her delicate wrist, there the crook of her elbow. And then around the place where her legs had splayed at odd angles, the folds of her dress unable to hide the ruin beneath. The memory of it seemed so contrary to the way Margret and Lucy had laid her out for the wake. They gathered up all her broken pieces and put her back together into a beautiful, serene farce of what she had been in life. It felt like a lie to look at her there, scrubbed of any trace of blood and arranged as though her bones had not been shattered.

So instead, she busied herself with the guests. With Lady Leadsom, still in denial about her husband. With the trains of girls who shared a profession with Charlotte, and yet none of her spirit. They were all reverent of the legendary C. W., and yet grateful that they had escaped a similar fate for at least one more day. With ignoring the men who turned up, said nothing, but left flowers anyways. These disappeared the swiftest. They swept in and out like ghosts, and Isabella did her best to ignore the obvious reason why.

Things had gone well until Isabella found herself in conversation with a woman she did not recognize. She had been frowning in a disgruntled way, and Isabella approached to see if she could smooth her ruffled feathers.

"You're taking all this in stride," the woman said with an unpleasant air and downturned mouth.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean, madam."

"You get to play the hero, but this isn't justice. Only a poor dead girl in a lady's house. You flaunted her like precious jewels, but your eyes are dry now." She was getting inordinately loud, the corners of her eyes tight with something too complex to name. Isabella would have called it grief, but there was more. She couldn't know what a young girl in the trade might be thinking about, worrying about, and she hadn't the fortitude in that moment to prod.

"My emotions are private and not for public display," Isabella said simply, keeping her voice down.

The woman opened her mouth to speak, but Nancy appeared just then. She had been hanging around Charlotte, clenching and unclenching her fists, looking around for any distraction but finding none.

"This is no place for raised voices," she said. "Pay your respects and leave the dead in peace."

The woman clamped her mouth shut, those troubled eyes bulging with all the rest she wanted to say. She turned curtly on her heel without another word and joined the queue of mourners filing past Charlotte.

Nancy looked after her until she was satisfied that the woman would make no more fuss, but then there was no where else for her to look but at Isabella. Her hard, appraising eyes were on her now. Isabella looked away and began to count the people in the room, a distracting habit she'd formed as a teenager. It was such an old habit, she had fallen out of it for a long time. Old habits, unlike lovers, never died. She was up to twenty three before her insides settled.

"Excuse me," she said, turning to retreat into a side room, but Nancy pursued her. For once she was without that ubiquitous birch rod, so there was little but the soft tapping of her bootheels to announce her presence.

"You put up a brave face in there," Nancy said. It could have been a compliment if not for a sour note lingering beneath.

"It still does not feel real," Isabella said, hoping to be done with all of this.

"That girl is a haughty slut." The end of her sentence hung open, unfinished.

"But? Say what you mean, Nancy."

"But was there any truth to it? Tell me true, what was my Charlotte to you?"

Isabella felt a chill settle into her heart. She closed her eyes a moment before turning to look at Nancy. She looked hollow and exposed. Her smudged makeup was more haphazard than usual, having been scrubbed at over and over throughout the day. She must have been worrying her hair as well as most of it had escaped it's loose binding.

"To me? She was everything. What, I wonder, was I to her?" That chill feeling was spreading, edging into her voice. "Tell me, Nancy. What was I to her? A friend? A cull? Someone to be duped and manipulated?"

Nancy looked down, balled fists on her hips. "It was complicated," she offered to the floorboards.

"Complicated. Don't come to me insinuating that I didn't care for her and then give me 'complicated'. I loved her." Isabella hadn't meant to say it, but it had come out anyway. It had been building in her and she couldn't hold it in any more. "I loved her!" Hot tears stung in the corners of her eyes. "She is everywhere in this house! She's at my breakfast table in the morning, around every corner, in my bed! I haven't slept in that bed because no matter what I do--no matter how many times I wash the sheets--they still smell like her, Nancy."

Nancy pressed her mouth into a hard line and turned away.

"But who was I to her?" Her voice had become strained and hoarse. "Who was I to her? What room do I have to claim her? I wasn't her mother, or her sister, or her brother, or her father. I didn't help raise her." Isabella jabbed a finger at Nancy who quietly shut the door as Isabella began to lose control of her tone.

"And on the day she died I find that I was hardly even her lover, I was only the woman who was paying her for sex!" Isabella looked up at the ceiling as the tears fell freely.

"But I loved her, Nancy. I loved her. And If I had told her? Nancy… If I had told her? Would she still have gone to him? Would she? Or would she still be alive?"

The long silence that followed left Isabella feeling lonelier than ever.

"Can't say," Nancy shrugged. "All I know is that Charlotte loved same as Mags--big and reckless, and never simple. Wells women are never simple." A rueful smile flickered across her face for a moment before it was snuffed out. Isabella felt an odd, painful kind of kinship with Nancy in that moment, but that too guttered in silence.

"But you can't fault them, neither of them," Nancy said. "Dogs bite, birds sing. Whores whore."

It was crude and hard. And true.

"No," Isabella said softly. "I do not fault her. But neither do I understand."

Between the two of them, neither could say whether Charlotte would still be alive, or how she really felt. In the dearth of answers, Isabella found she only had more questions. In the end, she had excused herself and retreated further into the estate in an attempt to find some peace.

Isabella crossed to the stairs and pulled aside a manservant. "Find Maryanne and tell her to send a note first thing in the morning to the contractor who did the banisters--Mr. Wendell. I want this floor ripped up by end of day tomorrow."

As Isabella ascended the stairs, she felt a weariness deep in her bones. It was as if she had been holding something heavy, and had only been able to stand for holding it. Now it was gone she felt empty and drained.

Even still, she did not call for a maid to undress her. Instead, she shed her dress like a husk and left her wig propped on the vanity and fell into bed.

The new linen crinkled stiffly beneath her, never having been used before. It smelled strangely sterile. Crisp, and clean. Like soap.


End file.
